Speak Through the Wind

by Allison K. Pittman

  “Quiet. Quick.”

  His coldness galled her. She felt sick, as if something besides her child had been ripped from her, leaving her hollow and weak. The dark wool coat of the man in front of her loomed closer as her legs gave out beneath her.

  “Careful.” Sean grasped her arms and stooped just a bit to come face-to-face with her. “Are you going to be all right? Should I get Ben?”

  “I will see him hang for this,” she whispered.

  “No, you won’t.” His lips barely moved. “Forget you know anything. Forget I said anything.”

  He loosened his grip slowly, as if testing her steadiness. Seeming satisfied, he called young Ryan over, saying, “See that she gets home safely,” before giving Kassandra a gentlemanly nod and setting off in the direction opposite Ben’s.

  Imogene’s death became a local, ironic tragedy: The beloved and revered midwife, unable to bring the Five Points prince into the world, went to her home and died—quietly, naturally, in her sleep. Nobody voiced the least bit of suspicion. Why would they when Ben Connor himself footed the bill for her funeral? For the second time in as many days, the Mott Street Tavern played host to a good Irish wake, this one full of celebration of a long life. Once again, Kassandra sat alone in her room, listening to it all. But on this night, unlike the night she spent with her son, she was grateful for her solitude as she cried thick, silent tears until the last drunken mourner was tossed into the street.

  Then, as empty as she had ever been, she slept.

  For weeks after, Kassandra saw next to nothing of Ben Connor. On the occasions that she made her way through the tavern to venture out into the streets, he might be behind the bar or conducting some sort of business at one of the tables, but he never acknowledged her. He hadn’t crossed the threshold of their flat since the funeral, and where he had been sleeping all these nights was a quandary answered by the excessive comforting offered to him by the second-floor girls as he made his rounds in the tavern.

  Two of those girls, however, Bridget and Fiona, showed their allegiance clearly to Kassandra. In the early days, when Kassandra couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed, they came to her with trays of food. They stayed to entertain her with conversation and news of the world outside, avoiding—after Kassandra’s initial reaction—any mention of the baby or Imogene. After a time they convinced her to get up and join the world again.

  “I do not have a world here,” Kassandra said. “Ben was my world.”

  “That world’s gone now, isn’t it?” Bridget replied. “Time to make yourself a new one.”

  But Kassandra had no idea just how or where she was to fit in now. The more time she spent in the cozy little flat that had once seemed like such a nest and home, the more she felt like a guest who had overstayed her welcome. Each day she tidied it up, then sat—expectantly—at the table until it was time to go to bed again. Whenever her meager food supply was depleted, she went to the little jar on the kitchen shelf where Ben had always deposited a few coins for household expenses and fished out enough to get a few groceries at Kinley’s. But after a week Kassandra began to wonder just what she would do when this little bit of money ran out.

  “Why doesn’t he just tell me to leave?” Kassandra asked Bridget and Fiona one day as the three women spent an afternoon chatting downstairs.

  “He hasn’t decided if he’s done with you yet,” Bridget said, casting the man himself a sidelong glance as he sat at the end of the bar, regaling a small gathering of men and women with some tale of import.

  “If he is done with me?” Kassandra said. “He has not even spoken to me, not once, since—”

  “He doesn’t know what to do with you,” Fiona said.

  “Does he give you one more chance? Send you home? Or kick you downstairs?” Bridget ticked the choices off on her fingers.

  “Well, he won’t send her back home,” Fiona said. “How would that look?”

  “Wait a minute,” Kassandra said. “What do you mean by kick me downstairs?”

  “Where do you think we all started?” Bridget said. “Most every girl here was Ben’s at some time.”

  “Now, Bridge,” Fiona said, “that’s not so. He might’ve brought them here, promised them things, but he didn’t …”

  “Have you two—been—with Ben?” Kassandra asked.

  “No, dear, no,” Fiona said, reaching a comforting hand to pat Kassandra’s arm and sending a scathing look toward Bridget. “And Bridget hasn’t, either. None of us has, no matter what it looks like.” This, as one of the women gathered around Ben let forth a stream of gilded laughter and laid her head on his shoulder. “Ben’s always made it very clear that he wasn’t going to sully himself with any of the likes of us—”

  “Yeah, the saint,” Bridget said.

  “He told me once that he thought I was pure,” Kassandra said. “He wanted me because he knew I was untouched.”

  “Exactly,” Fiona said. “We’re all just people he’s gathered around him. He gets a cut of the girls’ money, and in return we get a nice place to live. The Branagans take care of his business and get a kind of respect they wouldn’t get otherwise.”

  “The key,” Bridget said, her voice maintaining that sour note it always had, “is that everybody gives Ben something. From you, he wanted—”

  “A child,” Kassandra whispered.

  “That’s right. Since that didn’t happen …” She shrugged her shoulders broadly and settled back in her chair.

  “Give it time,” Fiona said. “He’s mourning, too, you know. This has been quite a shock. Ben always gets his way.”

  “And I am supposed to just sit up there, waiting for him to decide what he is going to do with me?”

  “You don’t have to,” Bridget said. “After all, you’re a great big grown-up girl. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen …” Bridget’s voice faded to a nostalgic note. “You remember sixteen, Fiona?”

  “Course I do. My father beat me till my teeth fell out, then took all the money I made whorin’ for his friends.”

  “That is awful!” Kassandra said.

  Fiona smiled, broadly enough that Kassandra could see the gaps of her missing teeth. “That’s when Ben found me. Brought me here. Said if I was goin’ to do a woman’s work I’d be keepin’ a fair share of the earnin’s.”

  “See?” Bridget said. “A true saint.”

  “And your father? Did you ever see him again?”

  Fiona’s smile remained, but the slightest narrowing of her eyes changed her countenance completely “Oh, no. Ben took care of that, too.”

  The echoes of their conversation remained in Kassandra’s mind as she made her way up to the third-floor flat later that afternoon. Had Ben ever loved her? Or was she just a kept woman to provide him with the son and heir he so desperately wanted? His passion had seemed so real when he first brought her here—his professions of love so emotionally charged. She’d truly believed that all of the excitement he’d shown over the coming child stemmed from his happiness at the thought of the three of them becoming a family. But, thinking back, there had never been any conversations about a future.

  Or marriage.

  She vacillated between feeling relief that she had no legal bond to this man, and wondering if, had she insisted that they follow what God commanded before ever sharing his bed, their son might have been spared.

  She opened the door to the familiar room: the little table with its two chairs, dishes neatly stacked on the shelf, the bed covered with Ben’s mother’s quilt. Besides the little bird figurine perched on the dresser, the room looked every inch the way it had when Ben first ushered her in here nearly a year ago. There was nothing to say it was her home. Nothing to speak of the ghosts of joy or the shattering tragedy that played out within its four walls. Her clothes were hung neatly behind the blanket nailed to the wall, her other things tucked away in the dresser drawers just as Ben always liked—no, insisted.

  She thought ba
ck to her room at Reverend Joseph’s, picturing how it must look now after she had tucked everything she owned into the parcel she’d carried here. She imagined it didn’t look a mite different than it had the moment she’d first opened her blinded eyes to it. No place, it seemed, had ever really been her own. Her life with Reverend Joseph and her life here with Ben weren’t much different than the life she’d lived on the streets as a child. Just find a place to rest for a while, then move on. The only difference was that, as a child, she had been in control of where she chose to lay her head. She alone wandered the streets and alleys finding just the right shelter for her needs. Shady and cool in the summer, curled-up and soft in the winter. No one ever scooped her up or led her anywhere.

  Well, she was now, as Bridget said, a great big girl. She wasn’t about to sit at this table and wait for Ben to show up and decide just what he was going to do with her.

  Moving quickly, she opened the dresser drawers and pulled out her clothing. Once again she took her best flannel nightgown and wrapped the precious sparrow figurine inside it. She took her dresses from the hooks on the wall, her brush and mirror from the top drawer. There, too, she saw Clara’s Bible, with Reverend Joseph’s letter tucked safely inside. She paused for just a moment to unfold it and brought to her lips a tiny lock of soft hair clipped from her son’s head in the wee hours before his burial.

  “Dear God,” she prayed aloud, “guide my steps.”

  She placed the lock of hair back in the letter’s crease, put the letter back in the Bible, and set it on top of everything she owned as she lifted the corners of Ben’s mother’s quilt to wrap up the entire bundle.

  “That’s when we get the best out of life, darling,” she said to Ben’s empty room, repeating the words he’d said to her in Reverend Joseph’s parlor, “when we take a chance.”

  Of course, some chances were just foolhardy. So, once packed and ready, she settled down in one of the kitchen chairs to wait until dark.

  Kassandra never was fully comfortable with the city at night. In truth, she’d been allowed very few forays into the dark streets, a fact that made her revel in her newfound independence all the more.

  She strode as purposefully as the intermittent crowds would allow. Late spring still meant cold, damp nights, and her steps brought her weaving through clumps of people gathered around makeshift fires in iron casks on the sidewalks.

  Habit had taught her to check over her shoulder frequently for the shaved Branagan heads following her through the streets, but even Sean’s attentiveness had waned of late, probably fueled by Ben’s own disinterest, and once she was out of Ben’s territory, she felt no need to check behind her.

  She took a deep, bracing breath and smiled. How could she ever have found the scent of the city distasteful? Yes, it was rancid and raw, but it was life. These were not people trapped in a little room waiting for someone to decide what to do with them. They were making their own way, surviving off the bounty of the streets.

  When she was a little girl, all she ever needed was the occasional scrap of food and a quiet corner to settle down. And hadn’t she been happy? Of course there had always been the tug of hunger, but that was just enough to keep her alive, alert. She hadn’t been hungry—truly hungry—in years. No wonder she’d been lulled into such complacency.

  She hazarded an occasional glimpse into the eyes of the women who stood, lounging and brazen on the street, their blouses open despite the evening chill, calling out promised favors to the men passing by. How different was she, really? Hadn’t she allowed Ben—a stranger—to kiss her? Touch her? She’d gone into his bed as willingly as any of these women would, taking lies for cash and ending up back on the street with the encounter over.

  She guessed it was about midnight. She’d been out of Ben’s sphere for little more than an hour when the first twinge of regret hit. It actually hit her from behind, coming in the form of a man running at full speed who either didn’t see her or didn’t care that she was in his path when he slammed into her, sending her bundle of belongings into the street and Kassandra right on top of it.

  “Get up, ya lousy jerk!”

  Kassandra lay in the street, her face buried in Ben’s mother’s quilt, certain that the command was meant for her until a stream of curses erupted from the man who had knocked her down. She gingerly turned her head to see him hauled to his feet, and the voices that had been bellowing an exchange of insults were soon quiet as two men began exchanging blows instead.

  She’d seen fights before. As a child, certainly, and from the safety of her third-story window she’d witness several displays of bravado fisticuffs and near-murderous violence. But never had she been close enough to feel the spray of blood from a shattered nose. In a frantic struggle to get out of the way, she found her legs tangled up with those of her earlier assailant, and within seconds the man was back on the ground, much to the amusement of both his opponent and the gathered crowd.

  “Hey there, Bob!” an anonymous voice called out. “Not like you’re the first one brought down by a whore’s skirt!”

  Raucous laughter followed as Bob disengaged himself and staggered to his feet. Kassandra, too, struggled up and was on her knees, her face bowed in shame as the crowd continued to shout its taunts.

  “Whoop, look out, Bob! She’s gettin’ up now. Watch she don’t knock you down this time!”

  “Yeah, take ’er on.” This the voice she recognized as Bob’s assailant. “You might have a chance beatin’ her.”

  “I’d take her on,” another man said. “Lay ’er back down again and take ’er right now.”

  “Lay her down? She’s already on her knees.” And a chorus of low chuckles.

  There was a palpable change in the crowd then. A primitive, canine-like quiet came over them—all of them—as the entertainment of an impromptu boxing match suddenly lost all its appeal. She still did not look up, but saw from the corner of her eye that the men were circling her. She saw filthy boots, dark pants—some nearly shredded—in a neat circumference around her. Then one pair of boots walked toward her and stopped in front. Soon she felt a hand at the back of her head, grabbing a handful of her hair, digging Ben’s comb deep into her scalp, and yanking until she was forced to look up into a face so bloodied and raw it must be Bob himself.

  “You knocked me down,” he said through swollen lips.

  “Get your filthy hands off me,” she said, squelching any instinct she had to plead or beg.

  An amused murmur resounded with the pack of men. Kassandra felt the release of her hair as Bob took a step away. The last thing she heard was “Slut!” before Bob’s boot collided with her face, and everything went black.

  er first instinct, even before opening her eyes, was to run her tongue along her teeth to ensure that none had been knocked out. A small matter of vanity, perhaps, but one that seemed logical considering the crushing pain and the taste of blood in her mouth.

  All there. A bit loose in the front, on the left, but none missing.

  She was cold. Even without opening her eyes she knew it was that gray, predawn time in the city, a time when the streets were nearly thick with silence. Drunks and revelers were settled in their flats or in stupors along the streets; vendors hadn’t yet brought out their carts and calls. The ground beneath her cheek was damp, and the chill of it seeped through her dress. She felt the hard-packed dirt beneath her open hand and gingerly patted it, reassuring herself that there was a solid world to carry her whenever she did choose to get up and join it.

  The first sight to greet her when she opened her eyes was the distorted vision of colors gathered together with loving, precise stitching. The quilt from their bed. She groped across the bundle to find the rope still knotted at the top, seemingly undisturbed. She rose up just a little, running her hands, caked with mud, over the fabric, feeling the outline of Clara’s Bible and the ridge of her hairbrush, taking comfort in the assumption that the bird figurine was still nestled inside.

  Nothing missing.r />
  But as she struggled to sit up, she felt a dampness in her skirt. Not anything seeped through from the street below, but something clinging against her very skin. That, combined with a tearing pain and a bunching of her underskirts triggered flashes of memory from the night before—flashes brighter than those first rays of sunlight piercing through the buildings looming over her.

  They had taken what they wanted, after all.

  The alley in which she revived herself—to which she had at some time, somehow been dragged—offered relative privacy from the stirrings on the street. The occasional passerby glanced in, but most ignored her as they would any other besotted mass. Kassandra herself had walked past and over countless such bits of humanity. Now she was thankful for the isolation as she crept further into its recesses, not yet trusting her legs to stand. There, hidden in the shadow of the tenement wall, she gingerly ran her fingers over her face. Swollen, yes, but no sign of any open wounds. Flakes of the crusted substance under her nose were dark, but the nose wasn’t broken. She didn’t doubt there was a fair amount of discoloration and bruising—she’d seen enough women with faces ravaged by their husband’s fists to know that—but all bruises fade over time.

  Then, her hands. The backs of them raw with cuts and scrapes, as though she’d valiantly defended herself. Closer inspection revealed dirt caked within the wounds, and she remembered. She hadn’t fought back; she’d been pinned down. But still, these wounds were nothing that a little water, bandage, and balm wouldn’t cure.

  And the other …

  Bracing herself against the wall she slowly stood up, then allowed herself a few steps, cringing at the chafing rawness. What had he—had they—done to her? She reached up her skirt and found the waist-tie of her bloomers, untied it, and let the garment fall around her ankles. After stepping out, she reached down and picked them up. The garment was smeared with blood, trailing halfway down the leg. She wadded up the material and tossed it to the ground beside her.

  Once again, she reached up under her skirt and found the waist of her first petticoat, untied it, and let it drop to the ground. This, too, she lifted for inspection. This, too, bore the stain of her blood and brought it all vividly back. The fruitless struggle as her skirts were lifted. Hands gripping her feet. Whiskey-soured breath breathing into her mouth. Dirt in her hair. And one after another, after another. The seemingly endless lot of them in turn rutting and swearing and laughing.